Nazis in fiction

Various propaganda films used the Nazis as a way to encourage patriotism and national pride, as well as a means to recruit soldiers into the Allied forces.

The British cinema were the main people to create such films before the American entry into the war following Pearl Harbor. The British comedian Will Hay created various films that ranged from Nazi spies being smuggled into mainland Britain via the Isle of Skye, to scientists working on gas-bombs.

American cinema at first used the Nazis only to show the stubbornness of the Reich, such as the 1942 film, Casablanca. American propaganda concentrated largely on the Japanese involvement in the war, with the Nazis as a backup.

The Looney Tunes and Walt Disney Studios used the Nazis as a ploy for their comic characters. However, Disney seemed to concentrate more on the German people within the Nazi Regime, as shown in their 1943 film, Der Fuehrers' Face, starring Donald Duck. Warner Brothers produced a series of propaganda cartoons named Private Snafu to train recruits on what not to do if they were in a situation similar to those in the cartoons.

The Star Trek episode Patterns of Force takes place on a planet where a regime resembling Nazi Germany was recreated due to the interference of a visitor from space.

The first and third films in the Indiana Jones franchise feature Nazis as the primary antagonists to the eponymous adventurer.

America's Best Comics #7 October 1943

The comic-book industry were able to boost their sales because of their help in the war effort meant that they were spared from paper recycling. Superheroes in particular, like Captain America were pictured as fighting the Nazis, both real and fictional, in large battles. The better remembered version is of Captain America fighting Adolf Hitler himself. In Fawcett Comics the character Captain Marvel fought against the Monster Society of Evil, which included Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo, along with Captain Nazi and Herr Phoul, a stereotypical Nazi officer. Captain Nazi was a superstrong perfect Nazi who was a major enemy of Captain Marvel Jr.. Hitler was shown in the hellish realm of the demon Mephisto in a Thor comic, and in a story where the demon Sattanish resurrects and empowers four historical murderers to form a Lethal Legion, one of them is Heinrich Himmler, who is given the power to belch gas fumes from his mouth.

The British comics tended to portray the Nazis as clumsy and foolish due to the cartoon-style of the comics available at that time, as shown in characters like Desperate Dan and Lord Snooty.

The retro-comic-book company, Big Bang Comics, have recreated a lot of Golden Age comics using Nazi characters for villains, ranging from Nazi spies to saboteurs. The All-Star Squadron of DC Comics was another retro-comic produced in the style of World War II propaganda comics. A tactic also used in the Amalgam Comics run with Super-Soldier.

By the beginning of the Silver Age of Comics in the 1960s, the focus of the Nazi threat turned to the threat of Communism with the rise of the Cold War. In the Flashpoint event Nazis are occupying Brazil.

Books written during wartime were few and far-between, partially from National Service that called up a large number of volunteers and the other from paper rationing. Outside of comics, only a few books were ever written for propaganda purposes. Those that were tended to work along the lines of the comic books.[2]

Yehiel De-Nur published accounts of his experiences at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He anonymously published his erotic The House of Dolls in 1955. The stalag fiction uses sexploitation to describe the German camp brothels in World War II. Yehiel De-Nur described how the Nazis forced women into sex slavery at the Freudenabteilung (Joy Division).

After the rise of the books, many men's magazines followed up with the same content. Real Men published a Nazi-themed cover and story in 1959.[3] Real Men followed up in 1960 with a similar cover with the featured story, "Inside the Nazi Death Chambers."[4] "The Underground Army of Red Recruiters... The Call Girl Traitors of Berlin" was the next story to appear in the magazine in 1961.[5] Another similar cover appeared in the same year,[6] again in 1964,[7] and again in 1965.[8] In 1966, the magazine published the article, "How We Broke Up the Fantastic Plot to Smuggle Hitler in Argentina."[9] Real Men published "Charlie Ruff--the Montana Hunter Who Destroyed the Nazi Fortress in Argentina" in 1967.[10]

Man's Epic featured a similar style with their first issue in September 1963.[11] The magazine published a similar cover in April 1964.[12] In August 1972, Man's Epic featured an apparent Neo-Nazi.[13]

"Wolfenstein" emerged in 1981 and focuses on the escape of a POW in a Nazi POW camp. Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992 for MS-DOS and arguably popularized the franchise, as well as the first-person shooter video game. The game is from the perspective of an American POW, William "B.J." Blazkowicz in WWII as he escapes several floors through opening various doors to find food and ammunition, but also to come across Aryan Nazi guards and violent German Shepherds. The game was considered a financial success, gathered awards, and is remembered as the first shooter game with rudimentary visual effects.[45]

• Arnold Toht - a psychotic Gestapo agent in Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Karl Marsen - from Night Train to Munich
• Quive-Smith - from Man Hunt
• Major Heinrich Strasser - from Casablanca
• Franz Kindler - from The Stranger
• Carl Lanser in Judgment Night
• Gunther Lutze - from Deaths-Head Revisited
• Oberst Kurt Steiner - played by Michael Caine in The Eagle Has Landed
• Herr Battler in George Bernard Shaw' 1938 play Geneva, a Fancied Page of History in Three Acts
• Tim and Eva in the Seinfeld episode "The Limo"
• Pop-Pop (Dee's Grandpa) from season one of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Red Skull - a Marvel Comics character
• Hydra - an organisation in Marvel Comics
• Arnim Zola - a Marvel Comics character
• Karl Ruprecht Kroenen - Hellboy's enemy
• Ultra-Metallo - A Nazi super-robot from Amalgam Comics
• Rudolph Müller - A Will Hay character, a spy
• Green Skull - Another Amalgam Comics character
• Baron Zemo - A Nazi aristocrat in Marvel Comics who after the war escaped to South America.
• Von Vultur - An anthropomorphic vulture who appeared alongside Daffy Duck
• Ingrid Weiss - A Neo-Nazi who fought Tom Strong
• Super Stormtrooper - A Big Bang Comics character, a Waffen-SS soldier
• Hitler Youth - Another Big Bang Comics character
• Oberst Max Radl - Appears in The Eagle Has Landed; organized the supposed kidnapping of Winston Churchill
• Franz Leibkind - A Neo-Nazi who wrote Springtime for Hitler
• Heinrich von Gitfinger - A Neo-Nazi featured in Captain Kremmen
• Captain Nazi - A DC Comics villain
• Baron Blitzkrieg - Foe of the All-Star Squadron
• Hauptmann Englande - An alternate Captain Britain from a world where the Nazis won World War II.
• The Z-34 - An excavator/submarine machine featured in Big Bang Comics
• Zwerg - Assistant to Baron Blitzkrieg
• Standartenführer Hans Landa - SS officer tasked with hunting Jews in Occupied France. Played by Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
• General von Talon - A Nazi falcon played by Tim Curry in the 2005 film Valiant
• Gestapo Sturmbannführer Ludwig Kessler - played by Clifford Rose in Secret Army
• Herr Otto Flick, a Gestapo officer in 'Allo 'Allo!
• Alfred Hoffman in the Fringe episode "The Bishop Revival"
• Arthur Arden - A convicted Nazi war criminal in American Horror Story
• The Major from Hellsing
• Kurt Dussander, commandant of Patin, a fictional concentration camp. Fugitive Nazi war criminal living under the alias "Arthur Denker" in California. Dussander is one of two main characters in Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil, under the section Summer of Corruption in the part of the collection Different Seasons, and also novella's 1998 film adaptation.
• Hans Volter - The antagonist of Killing Floor 2
• Rudol von Stroheim - A Nazi officer from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Battle Tendency, who helps the Ripple users defeat the Pillar Men.
• Major Neuheim - played by Ian Richardson in Private Schulz.
• SD Hauptsturmführer Viktor Stahl - played by Justus von Dohnányi in The Monuments Men
• Captain Klenzendorf, played by Sam Rockwell in Jojo Rabbit

• Nazi exploitation
• Adolf Hitler in popular culture
• Fiction based on World War II
• Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II